TENURE
TRACK
After two weeks,
Maddy is sure she’s going mad.
She and Bob have been
assigned a small prefabricated house (not much more than a shack,
although it has electricity and running water) on the edge of town.
He’s been drafted into residential works, put to work erecting more
buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success they’ve had,
because after a carefully controlled protest his status has been
corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee
surveyor. A promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently
taking it as confirmation that they’ve made the right move by
coming here.
Maddy, meanwhile, has
a harder time finding work. The district hospital is fully staffed.
They don’t need her, won’t need her until the next shipload of
settlers arrives, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go
tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a
year’s time the governor has decreed they’ll establish another
town-scale settlement, inland near the mining encampments on the
edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they’ll need medics to staff the
new hospital: but for now, she’s a spare wheel. Because Maddy is a
city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a
job hiking around the bush if she can avoid it.
She spends the first
week and then much of the second mooching around town, trying to
find out what she can do. She’s not the only young woman in this
predicament. While there’s officially no unemployment, and the
colony’s dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for
idle hands, there’s also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or
indeed much of anything else she can do. Career-wise it’s like a
trip into the 1950s. Young, female, and ambitious? Lots of
occupations simply don’t exist out here on the fringe, and many
others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees
mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers, their
guardians pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids,
although Maddy’s not ready for that yet. But the alternatives on
offer are limited.
Eventually Maddy
takes to going through the “help wanted” ads on the bulletin board
outside city hall. Some of them are legit: and at least a few are
downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant wanted for
biological research. I wonder? she
thinks, and goes in search of a door to bang on.
When she finds the
door—raw wood, just beginning to bleach in the strong colonial
sunlight—and bangs on it, John Martin opens it and blinks
quizzically into the light. “Hello?” he asks.
“You were advertising
for a field assistant?” She stares at him. He’s the entomologist,
right? She remembers his hands on the telescope on the deck of the
ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false patina of
romance in her memories compared to the dusty present it has
delivered her to.
“I was? Oh—yes, yes.
Do come in.” He backs into the house—another of these identikit
shacks, colonial, family, for the use
of—and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room.
It’s almost completely filled by a worktable and a desk and a tall
wooden chest of sample drawers. There’s an odd, musty smell, like
old cobwebs and leaky demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around
his den, vaguely disordered by the unexpected shock of company.
There’s something touchingly cute about him, like the subjects of
his studies, Maddy thinks. “Sorry about the mess, I don’t get many
visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant
experience?”
She doesn’t hesitate:
“None whatsoever, but I’d like to learn.” She leans forward. “I
qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college I was studying
biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I was
thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that’s
not going to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no
vacancies, so I need to find something else to do. What exactly
does a field assistant get up to?”
“Get sore feet.” He
grins lopsidedly. “Did you do any lab time? Fieldwork?” Maddy nods
hesitantly so he drags her meager college experiences out of her
before he continues. “I’ve got a whole continent to explore and
only one set of hands: we’re spread thin out here. Luckily NSF
budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant’s job is to be my
Man Friday; to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help
with basic lab work—very basic—and so on. Oh, and if they’re
interested in entomology, botany, or anything else remotely
relevant, that’s a plus. There aren’t many unemployed life sciences
people around here, funnily enough: have you had any
chemistry?”
“Some,” Maddy says
cautiously; “I’m no biochemist.” She glances round the crowded
office curiously. “What are you meant to be doing?”
He sighs. “A primary
survey of an entire continent. Nobody, but nobody, even bothered
looking into the local insect ecology here. There’re virtually no
vertebrates, birds, lizards, what have you—but back home there are
more species of beetle than everything else put together, and this
place is no different. Did you know nobody has even sampled the
outback fifty miles inland of here? We’re doing nothing but
throwing up shacks along the coastline and opencast quarries a few
miles inland. There could be anything in the interior, absolutely
anything.” When he gets excited he starts gesticulating, Maddy
notices, waving his hands around enthusiastically. She nods and
smiles, trying to encourage him.
“A lot of what I’m
doing is the sort of thing they were doing in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Take samples, draw them, log their habitat
and dietary habits, see if I can figure out their life cycle, try
and work out who’s kissing cousins with what. Build a family tree.
Oh, I also need to do the same with the vegetation, you know? And
they want me to keep close watch on the other disks around Lucifer.
‘Keep an eye out for signs of sapience,’ whatever that means: I
figure there’s a bunch of leftovers in the astronomical community
who feel downright insulted that whoever built this disk and
brought us here didn’t land on the White House lawn and introduce
themselves. I’d better tell you right now, there’s enough work here
to occupy an army of zoologists and botanists for a century; you
can get started on a PhD right here and now if you want. I’m only
here for five years, but my successor should be okay about taking
on an experienced RA . . . The hard bit is going to be maintaining
focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the
governor-general’s discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him,
but it won’t be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be
enough?”
Maddy thinks for a
moment. Truman dollars—the local scrip—aren’t worth a whole lot,
but there’s not much to spend them on. And Rob’s earning for both
of them anyway. And a PhD . . . That could be
my ticket back to civilization, couldn’t it? “I guess so,”
she says, feeling a sense of vast relief: so there’s something
she’s useful for besides raising the next generation, after all.
She tries to set aside the visions of herself, distinguished and
not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor’s chair at an
Ivy League university. “When do I start?”